


Brechung

by RC_McLachlan



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M, No Beach Divorce, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 17:39:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5300639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RC_McLachlan/pseuds/RC_McLachlan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Somewhere, there is an Erik who never escaped the thrall of a submarine and gifted his last breath to the sea, and an Erik who doesn't flinch when fingers brush the skin stretched across a temple, and an Erik who sits at the right hand of a tyrant wreathed in fire and stolen power, and an Erik who acted on the nearly overwhelming desire to kiss a too-red mouth while the sun was warm and a satellite dish beckoned him with song.</em>
</p>
<p><em>Somewhere, there is an Erik who moved the coin.</em> </p>
<p>Or, the one in which Destiny gives Erik a reason to change the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brechung

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arcapelago (arcanewinter)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanewinter/gifts).



> [Arcapelago](http://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanewinter/pseuds/arcapelago) is my favorite XMFC author, and guess the hell what—they've been following me on Tumblr ALL THIS TIME. I was so excited that my hand slipped and I accidentally wrote them fic. Oops.
> 
> A million thanks to [hitlikehammers](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers) for being the best beta and friend a girl could ask for!

"He's graceful."

It shouldn't be true—the man isn't tall nor his legs long, and his years spent in academia and drinking in university pubs should have left him paunchy and complacent, but Charles moves like he was born to do it, each step infused with wild precision. His feet barely hit the grass of the mansion's grounds as he runs. Raven lunges at him from behind, and Charles is the crash of a wave against a seawall, purposeful and fluid. There's a cry of surprise as she nearly hits the ground, flexing her body to somehow avoid crashing into Sean's legs, and Charles flits away, his laughter curling through the air and pressing into Erik's ear with the neediness of a neglected lover. _Look at me_ , it whispers, _don't take your eyes off me_.

As if Erik could, when Charles Xavier looks like he's flying.

"I wouldn't know," Erik says, a handful of moments later, but the hesitation is too telling. A goddamn rookie mistake. He should cover it with a display of power—heat up the aluminum of her necklace, sear it into her skin—but bites down on the urge entirely. He isn't entirely sure why, but he knows that intimidation of any kind will be useless here.

She had refused tea, but graciously accepted a small cup of hot water, honey, and lemon. The cup looks like a bug caught in a web, cradled between spindly fingers as she needlessly closes her eyes to inhale the steam. She looks unfairly put together, seated at the little bistro table as though posing for a portrait.

"You needn't fear it," she murmurs, taking a sip of her drink. "Or me. Save your worries for tomorrow."

His fingers curl around the cast-iron guard rail. It softens beneath his palms, waiting to be molded into something more—a weapon, a shield. "Is that why you're here? Tomorrow?"

"What would you do in my place?"

"If I could do what you do?" He asks, and she inclines her head, a regal gesture that is not out of place with her high collar and full skirt, the hairstyle she wears that he's never seen in a magazine but spied in old paintings and once in a play. "If I could see the future, I wouldn't be contemplating tomorrow at all."

She chuckles. "'See the future'. Time is not so easily read, nor could it be. If you could do what I do, you would live in a world made entirely of mirrors, where life is a fractured reflection, and each one is an entire world unto itself. There is no one, single future."

As if in possession of a gift that isn't hers, the woman who introduced herself at the front door as Irene Adler opens her sightless eyes and stares straight into Erik's. She can't see the way his hands grip the railing, but she can see every facet of his existence on every plane in every timeline. Thousands of Erik Lehnsherrs. He, himself, is but a shade of an unknown whole.

You know nothing about me, he wants to hiss, _You may think you do, but you don't. You don't know me, you don't know Charles, and you don't know what's coming tomorrow._ He wants to feel the muscles of her arm recoil beneath the bite of his fingers when he shoves her out the door, out of this place he has tentatively decided to call home. Away from the one person who could and would be influenced by whatever it is she thinks she has on him.

She simply stares. Stares, and _knows_.

Somewhere, there is an Erik who never escaped the thrall of a submarine and gifted his last breath to the sea, and an Erik who doesn't flinch when fingers brush the skin stretched across a temple, and an Erik who sits at the right hand of a tyrant wreathed in fire and stolen power, and an Erik who acted on the nearly overwhelming desire to kiss a too-red mouth while the sun was warm and a satellite dish beckoned him with song.

Somewhere, there is an Erik who moved the coin.

He doesn't know which one is the right one, the better one, and the thought of knowing makes his gorge rise.

"Why are you here?" Erik—whichever one he is—asks, hoarse, horrified. "Is tomorrow going to be so terrible that you'd come all the way here to tell me?"

She rises from her chair in one fluid motion and moves to stand next to him, hands easily finding the railing, and the way she tilts her chin down toward where Charles runs belies the fact that she can't see any of it.

"I've seen many things—wars fought, laws passed, culture progression, music and fashion shifts—and I see them on every plane. A single point of light refracted in a spectrum, millions of possibilities." Irene smiles. "I'm old."

"How old is old, exactly?"

"Very old," she says dryly. "Older than you. Older than your vengeance. Older than Sebastian Shaw and the horrors he's inflicted on the world."

He has no desire to press further. He most likely doesn't want to know an exact number. "You foresaw the camps. The Nazis. You knew what was going to happen."

"Yes."

His mind immediately brings them to the forefront—his father, his uncles, his mother, and the countless bodies in shallow graves, thrown atop each other like rubble—and the old rage comes bubbling up, a roil like fire, magma.

_Alles ist gut._

It's more than easy to throw a hand out and grab hold of her aluminum necklace, to order it to tighten around the slim column of her throat and squeeze. It heeds him gladly and sets to work, twisting until it bites into her skin. Through it, as if it were his own hand, he can feel the press of her trachea as it shudders against the pressure and threatens to break under it.

"You knew and you did nothing!" He hisses, and he wonders how many refracted lights had been cast from the prism of his mother's final words. "Millions—millions of them died, and you sat back and let it happen!"

Her eyes are wide and hold nothing, everything, and she makes no move to defend herself. Not even to try and pull the traitorous chain from her neck.

He holds it there for another moment and then releases her, the way she knew he would, and he ignores her as she falls to her knees and coughs. When she can breathe normally again, despite the thickness of her tongue, she gets to her feet and settles at the railing next to him.

"What could I have done?" Irene asks, hoarse. "Who would have believed the blind woman claiming that a faction in Germany was doing unspeakable things in the name of a new world order?"

The thing is, she's right. Nothing would have been done. Nothing was done even when people were whispering about the atrocities, the rumors passed in dark alleys and old pubs. It was the world's worst-kept secret, and no one moved to bring it into the light until it was past the point of no return. It was the foundation upon which a war was fought, and who doesn't love a good war?

He doesn't apologize, but then the expectation for it isn't anywhere in her expression. She knows she's not getting one.

"Can you tell me one thing? If you remember. It was years ago, but—"

"Yes."

"Yes, you remember, or yes, it was always going to happen?"

"Both." She pats at the raw skin of her throat. "There was never a time in which your mother lived, Erik. I never saw a kinder ending to her story. I'm sorry."

As a boy, Erik used to wake, crying, the blunted knives in the kitchen pawing at the walls in their need to be by his side, his little tin soldiers scattering like rats on the floor, awaiting orders. He would keep himself awake for days, his legs clumsy, his mind sunk in a haze. The other children used to laugh at him, _Loopy Lehnsherr, can't pay attention, always plays the games wrong_. But none of them knew what the price of alertness was. Landscapes in grays and steel, wastelands stretching into the horizon, populated by discarded dresses and slacks, empty shoes whose owners had long since abandoned them—all of these and more waited for him the moment he closed his eyes. Sleep's brush forgot how to paint trees and birds and the sun, or perhaps it knew them well and decided he did not deserve them.

And his poor, tired mother sang _Durme, Durme_ to him every single night, her voice high and lovely, _sleep my little one, sleep without worry or pain_ , and it was the strongest shield imaginable against his own metallic thoughts. The night the soldiers packed them into a truck with strangers and acquaintances who smelled like fear, she held him the entire way. _Durme, durme, izhiko de Madre, con ermozura de Shema Yisrael._

Time didn't think it fitting to give a woman like that a kind ending. Erik drops his head and bites down on a hysterical laugh.

"Thank you," he says, and means it, all the way through blood, muscle, and bone. "I needed to hear that. It makes what I'm going to do tomorrow that much easier."

"Shaw," Irene says.

"Shaw," Erik agrees.

Shrieking laughter explodes below them. Leading his pack of misfits on a merry chase, Charles soars on his feet.

Raven's long, powerful legs easily overtake her brother, and she throws him on his back, squealing as Charles begins spinning in circles. They eventually crumble to the grass in a heap of laughter and good-natured shoving.

"Always running," Irene murmurs thoughtfully, an odd lilt to her mouth.

Charles had readily accepted her into the manor with a smile and an invitation to discuss "co-existing timelines" and "grandfather paradoxes" and Dr. Hugh Everett's _Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics_ , but when Irene had told him that he wasn't to be part of the conversation he'd withdrawn with only a hint of a whine, promising them privacy.

Erik isn't sure he entirely believes him. He knows full well how much Charles enjoys finding loopholes in his own vows, but he hasn't felt the stirrings of something other in the back of his mind yet; he's willing to give Charles the benefit of the doubt.

"Do I kill him?"

"Do you kill whom?"

"Shaw, of course," Erik snaps. "Who else would I—"

As if privy to the conversation, Charles's laughter slows until it's gone and he looks up, caught in the bright thrall of the setting sun, and throws a hand up in a wave. Even at this distance he can see the way the last rays of light gild Charles's eyes, and the metal under Erik's hands solidifies suddenly and cracks.

"No. No, that is not how it ends," Erik grits out, trembling, something tight and awful snapping inside of him. "I kill _Shaw_. Only Shaw. An eye for an eye—I could forgive what he did to me, but what he did to _her_ … It's has always been Shaw, and it always will be—on every plane, in every timeline. I don't care what you think you know, because you don't know this. Nothing will happen, except Sebastian Shaw will be wiped from this earth, and the only thing to show that he was ever here is what I take with me to my grave. Do you understand me? If that isn't what your future shows, then rewrite it."

Irene says nothing for a long time, and the silence stretches between them like an old rubber band, fraying until it snaps. "He loves to run. He did as a child, from his mother and stepfather and stepbrother, disappearing into the trees until he was wind and earth and sky, hills and beaches and cities. His feet were dirty with soil and his hair smelled like rain. His legs would hold him through it until they couldn't, burning and exhausted, and he loved them for it. Back then, he ran to find happiness. He runs now because he has found it in the others that run with him. He is not alone."

_You're not alone, Erik._

"I don't interfere," Irene continues. Her hand lifts and elegantly cups outward, entreating the air, and only then does Erik see a tiny seedling from one of the trees float into her palm, drifting on wings of cotton and summer. It lands perfectly, as she no doubt knew it would. "It has nothing to do with ethics, or cowardice, or indifference… but I am not the one who should be in charge of the world, nor do I want to be. I have never once had a desire to shape Time to suit me. What a truly boring world it would be—one without surprises."

He takes a deep breath, then another, and below Charles is set upon by his children, tackled to the ground where he laughs and laughs and laughs.

"Who are you?" Erik whispers, and she smiles.

"I traveled as a fortune teller with a circus, once. They gave me a crystal ball, but I hadn't needed one when I told them the elephants would trample their trainer on a cold Thursday, when the old stagehand would set fire to the main tent and kill three children. Perhaps they felt safer when I cradled the glass in my hands, as if I could only invoke Time when I touched it. They called me Destiny." Slowly, the fond lilt to her mouth is leeched away, and she closes her fingers around the seedling in her palm. "I know how it ends. I know how everything ends—every possibility, every tweak—and never before have I ever wanted to interfere. Until now."

The shadows on her face, a marriage of the lights shining through the windows of the manor and the newly-fallen twilight, cast her in between planes; both otherworldly and utterly, irrevocably present. She turns away from the balcony and faces him, her eyes blank and sharp, startling. _I know you_ , they say, _and I find you wanting._

"You do it, Erik. Tomorrow you kill Sebastian Shaw, and then you ascend his throne."

There's a rumble, and for a moment he thinks it's distant thunder, a storm rolling in from the west, but the cast-iron railing stills under his hands with a silent command.

Taking his wrists, she places his hands upon her face and steps close, her neck red, and he sees himself in her eyes, tall and brilliant and unstoppable on a beach, clad in black and yellow with an ugly crown upon his head. He makes a rather statuesque king, and he watches, stomach clenching and the railing threatening to rip apart and fly off to destinations unknown, as his first royal decree is to bury a bullet into the spine of the one man who does not deserve it. Charles—graceful, soaring, barely earthbound Charles—crumbles to the sand, strings cut, and Erik watches himself, the lord of all he surveys, drop to his knees and reach out and—

_Don't touch him_ , he thinks wildly. _Don't, you'll ruin him!_

He turns Charles as if he means to place him upon his feet again and order him to bow, but he doesn't, and apologies and accusations fight for a place upon the king's lips. He watches as he wars against his enemies, castigates his own court, and attempts to murder an ally. He rises, beckons his new following, picks and steals from the old, and disappears, leaving the only one for whom he would wear the crown to the mercy of the sand and sun, broken, the very legs cut out from under him. Charles's mouth moves as Moira attempts to help him sit up, and Erik doesn't need to hear the words to know them.

"I do this."

Thin hands curl around his own and gently disengage them from where his nails have left half-moons on Irene's face. His legs forget their purpose for a moment, sending him stumbling back against the iron railing, which has fallen silent and steady in his shock.

"Perhaps," Irene murmurs and lightly touches the indents in her skin, fingers fluttering over the marks with a quiet reverence. "Perhaps you do. Perhaps you take every possible measure to ensure that Charles Xavier will never run again."

_I could stop you from leaving. I could, but I won't._

"Or."

Her future no longer has its hooks in him, but he feels the sting where they had gripped him so tightly, little bits of himself leaking from marks made bloody with possibility. He sees himself as a murderer without regard for life—mutant or otherwise—and a future wreathed in flame and sentient metal. He sees them rounded up, hunted, killed. He sees Charles, old and without hope, clinging to him at the end of all things.

_All those years wasted fighting each other, Charles… to have a precious few of them back…_

He drags in a shaky breath and infuses his knees with the strength of steel. When he stands and turns back to look over the Westchester grounds, it is with a great weight upon him, but he bears it as best as he can—as best as he always has.

Below, Charles catches sight of them and lifts a hand.

"Or," Erik echoes, breathless, and looks away from the man from whom he has already taken so much.

A smile breaks across her face as slow and bright as dawn over a new world. "Or, perhaps you don't."

"That's it? That tells me _nothing_. What do I need to do to ensure that he—which is the right one?"

"They are all the right one."

The railing threatens to detach with an ominous rumble. "A future in which I do that to mutantkind… to _him_ … is not the right one."

Irene lowers her hands to her skirt, the movements precise and painfully graceful. Whether she is so fastidious because of her gift or a long-instilled more from a society no longer relevant, he doesn't know, but the seconds drip by like minutes as she smooths wrinkles and picks imaginary dust from the immaculate fabric.

"Time does not exist in the realms of right and wrong, Erik." She says it like she's disclosing a secret. "It does not love. It does not care. It simply is—it is us who give it meaning, and who cause it to change."

He thinks of Sebastian Shaw's kind smiles and cruel hands, and his body recalls with startlingly clarity the edges of Shaw's knives, the frigid embrace of the operating table, the brush of his breath when he would whisper to Erik about how they were the future, how they would eradicate the humans and instill a new world order. _Humanity is an infestation, Erik, and mutantkind the exterminators. We must dirty the world in order to appreciate it when we cleanse it of the vermin._

He thinks of the old propaganda posters that depicted his people as roaches. He thinks of the edges of the stars and how they looked like clipped wings. He thinks of his mother and the modest memory of her, of their dilapidated menorah, and the soft, papery hand that cupped his cheek across the flames.

He thinks of Charles Xavier, who runs like he ought to fly.

When the decision comes, it isn't with the compounded power of his many torments and trespasses, nor the judgment he, himself, has meted out. It washes over him like the voice that was birthed from the waves of an uncharacteristically cold Miami bay, pulling him back from an edge with the promise of being known by someone who would understand.

_You have to let it go._

"Then I will cause it to change." It should grate to walk away from everything he's worked toward all these years, but it doesn't. It should burn to release his vengeance. Instead, he feels buoyant with new purpose. 

"Will you?" But she's smiling. Who knows what she sees.

"I suppose only time will tell."

+

By the time Erik reaches his room, he's halfway to falling apart. The adrenaline rush from the battle has long-since ebbed, leaving behind a cold hollowness that yawns wide in his gut, and no amount of willpower can stem the deep tremble that's made a home in his hands. It takes more tries than he's comfortable with to unzip the scorched leather of his suit, but he finally frees himself with a sound not unlike a sob.

The bed feels like an impossible luxury beneath him when he collapses there. He can't muster the energy to draw the sheets down, already drifting away from the horrors crushed to sand on the shore of a beach he'll never revisit as long as he lives.

Without permission, the fingers of his right hand skitter out, sliding over cool sheets in search of the refraction point where Erik Lehnsherr disperses into thousands of wavelengths, all of them the right and wrong one. How many of them walked away from the beach with Charles at their side, together marching the stride of the victorious? How many of them left him to the sand and the shock of a new existence forced upon him?

How many of those Eriks made sure that Charles would never run again?

Sleep dances just out of his reach and his mind, blank with exhaustion, tirelessly chases the futures that never were and always are.

A morbid voice in the back of his mind whispers that this is his punishment for taking charge of it, for playing Irene's game of chance and shifting the weight of his destiny. Maybe he is the Erik Lehnsherr who was supposed to abandon Charles on that beach and make an enemy out of humankind, reduce it to ash and sentinel alloy, too old and too broken to atone for his sins at the end of the world. Time will catch up to him somehow and correct it. There will come a day when it takes back what he stole, and Charles Xavier will pay the ultimate price for it.

_And that's **quite** enough of that, thank you._

Distantly, Erik hears the padding of bare feet upon thick carpet, feels the bed dip beneath a new body—warm, intent. Flesh cleaves to flesh as Charles slots himself up against Erik with the swift move of a chess piece, taking him captive; Erik sighs and buries his nose into Charles's hair, inhaling laughably expensive shampoo and the lingering smell of salt.

_Oh, my dear_ , Charles croons silently, making a stage out of Erik's own mind. _We make our own destinies. This is ours, and what a destiny it will be._

"How can you be so sure?" Erik murmurs, and his fingers are drawn to the unbreakable steel in Charles's spine, dragging up and down, reverent. It's the one thing he's unable to manipulate, and he has never been so grateful. 

Instead of answering, Charles pushes closer until Erik loses the topography of himself and they merge together. _Tomorrow, we will all sleep in past noon, and we will go into town to the new ice cream parlor that opened in Rye and gorge ourselves until we're fit to be sick. A breakfast of champions. And then we will all pile in the TV room and watch Ed Sullivan, and then… and then you will take me to bed… And after that, we will begin anew. We will create a future that supersedes every other until there is only the one you and I make together._

His eyes drift shut, and his fingers go still on knobs of bone, victorious where they press gently on the refraction points that turn the twists of Irene's possibilities into light. 

"But how can you be sure?" The words barely make it off his sluggish tongue as oblivion beckons, dragging him down. 

_I can't._ Charles shifts, and the last thing Erik feels before dropping into sleep is something soft and warm being pressed to his mouth. _I suppose only time will tell._


End file.
